a GOOD day!

I had a great day at the market. People like my totally zero packaging/waste approach! It's nice being around people who embrace what I am doing and call it INSPIRING! Honestly it hasn't been that hard. As I go along the more options open up. I think one just has to make the decision to go package free in order for the change to happen. Today I found two vendors willing to take my bottles for fresh apple cider (I bring the empties and they refill and bring the following week). I also found someone making shampoo who is happy to fill my containers. If anything it makes shopping easier (less to decide, less impulse buys) but it also seems to open up MORE options as you start to look in new places (for me new vendors at the market) instead of just my usual set patterns of who I visit. So I am having FUN with this ... ALOT.

Home made cleaning products!

Okay this is a challenge.

Yes the basics are great - baking soda, vinegar - and I've been using them for years. BUT when you start getting into things like dish soap, shampoo... this is a little different!

YES I can use baking soda and vinegar for washing dishes... but I really do like suddsy water!! AND my homemade dish soap (50% water / 50% Dr. Bronner's liquid Castille soap) is actually quite expensive and so runny that you ended up using more. So I'm back to our local natural product (that I can still fill bulk at my OLD local health food store) except I don't like this because A) it takes too long to pour out and B) I've got a squirmy squiggling baby attached to me (who would disapear instantly if I set him down). I'm also wondering how GREEN this product really is. The part that bugs me the most - the local company selling this green line - sells ALL the BAD BAD industrial cleaning products. This just happens to be his one green line (sold of course under a different name so the average consumer of course is completely unaware!!).

Okay and the shampoo I made - SUCKED (1 tbspn Dr. Bronners, 7 Tbspn water, 1 tspn olive oil). AND it meant that I showered every day because my hair looked so gross. So that is going backwards because if I have a good shampoo I can go 3 days.
No impact man decided he didn't like that recipe either and prefers baking soda... I have yet to try this.

SO next on the list... homemade toothpaste... or again plain baking soda.

ANYWAY my goal here is NOT to make life miserable but to find ACCEPTABLE, workable, solutions that somehow can be integrated into my schedule without taking up too much time!! i.e. no more time than it would take to go buy it from a store!!

So the quest is on for reasonable, good, and effective GREEN cleaning recipes!

What I've done so far

Over the last few weeks we have completely stopped using packaging for all food purchases. Hence no bags (not even paper) for ANYTHING. This means loose potatos, loose oranges, no ready washed organic mesclun, cucumbers that don't have plastic wrap etc etc. Here is what I've done for cheese - I've got a local producer who kindly blocks my cheese and puts it into a container I've provided. Any bread we buy is fresh at market and goes into my own cloth bag. Basically I bring containers and bags for EVERYTHING. The only exception thus far has been butter and the tinfoil wrap. We LOVE butter.

Even my daughter's easter chocolate was bought from a local chocolate maker, bulk and package free. We hid the chocolate in grandma provided plastic easter eggs saved from earlier years Easters.

Thus far we are managing... but I do have a rather generous array of product still in my cupboards... so it's going to get harder!!!!

But I am amazed at how much your purchasing / buying behaviours change when you strive for ZERO.

You also start to notice how much disposable packaging is being used that we just take for granted. What disgusts me is how much PLASTIC packaging is being used at our local farmer's market. I can't get local spinach... because it's all bagged!! Likewise for sprouts, and many other things!! All the cheese producers use plastic. I'm lucky to just find a nice guy who will block some off separately for me each week.

I'm also discovering that there are VERY few options available. Our local Halifax health food store recently stopped doing the bulk refill of cleaning products. Apparently the Body Shop did bulk refill too but they stopped this a number of years back.

We are going - BACKWARDS. All due to convenience and economics!! I certainly know that for the local health food store it was not due to LACK of sales. My health food store (on the outskirts of town) sold a ton of the same product. The problem --- it's messy, the staff need to know how to use/set the weigh scales, and it takes up valuable /shelf floor space where you could put more smaller objects thus increasing retail value per square foot. ECONOMICS. (i.e. cost of staff, cost of space).

You have to start somewhere

Every little bit counts. For a few weeks now I've been trying to go much greener than what my family was already doing. Okay we recycle, make efforts to reduce our packaging (buy bulk where possible, eat in restaurants with real cutlery, use cloth bags, travel mugs, reusable stainless steel water bottles), we buy local and mostly local organic, we shop at the farmer's market, buy bulk from local farmers, use our compost bin, try to economize car trips etc etc. In fact we do WAY more than most (okay EVERYONE) we know. BUT still it has been NOT good enough and for awhile now (2 years!!) I've been wanting to do better. I've been plotting the bread making, and yogurt making, and okay yes owning our own chickens / goats to somehow rid ourselves of our last vestiges of packaging. More on this later.

OKAY anyway to make a long story short... I decided we would do better and well we're trying to finally go ZERO packaging.

It is definitely harder than one thinks. For instance tonight we ate out at our local chinese food restaurant - I removed the paper placemats (the glass tables seemed clean enough!) and passed them back to the waitress. Nothing I could do about paper napkins... I still haven't gotten organized enough to carry our own ready supply of cloth napkins (we use them at home!). Oops the waitress brought straws in our water!!! I make a mental note to remember this the next time we go to this restaurant. Okay so TWO strikes (paper napkins and straws). BUT here is where we scored - we used ZERO paper placemates, I used some of my baby's cloth wipes to avoid asking for more napkins (Geez... guess these could have been our napkins!.... but somehow... using something normally destined for my son's behind does not feel appetizingly acceptable as dinner napkins!)okay back to where we scored, I used 2 jam jars that my daughter and I had used earlier in the day for our soup at lunch to store the leftovers in, and we declined the plastic wrapped fortune cookies. And I declined the disposable chopsticks and used real cutlery instead. Not perfect but HEY we saved two sets of chopsticks, 3 mats, plastic packaging and the containers for leftovers. Pretty good I guess. But it is amazing to think of how much packaging we generate without even giving it any thought. Oh yeah... the 2 waitresses looked at me like they thought I was CRAZY! And all I could think was I'm not the crazy one here... you guys are the crazy ones for not seeing we have a problem - using Earth's ressources for the convenience of a few seconds for things that will end up in a landfill for hundreds of years! And, that somehow what we consider normal and okay is so very wrong and backward!